Quote

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

Wallace Stevens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
World
Calm
Became
Quiet
Reader
House
Book

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
Wallace Stevens
Image
At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace Stevens
Image
In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens
Image
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
Image
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens
Image
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
Wallace Stevens
Image
To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
Image
After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
Wallace Stevens